A poor defense of censorship on Tiananmen anniversary

Today, the 24th anniversary of the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen
Square, a Chinese state-run newspaper ran a piece justifying censorship of the Web
by citing recent attempts at media regulation abroad.

The nationalist-leaning Global
Times published an editorial
harping on a recent German federal court
decision that ordered Google to remove defamatory autocomplete entries from
its search engine after plaintiffs argued their privacy rights were being violated.
The piece also calls attention to criticism
of an unregulated Internet in the British Parliament and lends support to
Turkey's recent vilification
of social media as "the worst menace to society" during ongoing demonstrations
in Istanbul.

The piece underscores how China closely watches foreign
governments' words and actions in regards to media regulation, and opportunely
uses them as justifications for its own attempts at censorship. "Different countries have to choose different
policies according to their own actual needs to protect their public
interests," the newspaper wrote.

The Global Times
disingenuously claims that China's policies are "laid on the foundation of the
public interest," rather than attributing its media controls to the Chinese
Communist Party's own fear of losing control. If Chinese authorities were
acting in the public interest, its citizens would have the right to information
on issues of concern to them. On the anniversary of an event
that tore at the fabric of Chinese society, it's difficult to comprehend how
censoring images of big
yellow ducks and Lego
figures is serving the public interest. People are unable to talk openly,
or even subtly, on a matter of extreme historical importance.

Tellingly, the Global
Times does not make a single mention of the word "censorship," and hides
behind euphemisms such as "regulation" and "regulatory approaches." As CPJ has emphasized
in the past, this should serve as a reminder to Western governments that their approach
to media can have far-reaching implications in other parts of the world. To
compound the problem--as discussed in CPJ's recent special
report on China--Beijing's complex digital censorship system is admired and
emulated by authoritarian regimes around the globe.

Sumit Galhotra is the research associate for CPJ's Asia program. He served as CPJ's inaugural Steiger Fellow and has worked for CNN International, Amnesty International USA, and Human Rights Watch. He has reported from London, India, and Israel and the Occupied Territories, and specializes in human rights and South Asia.